re Don's response:Primary and secondary

• Welcome to the BOL Forum on Shame and Affect Theory by John Grohol, 2/10/96
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    • Primary and secondary shame by Don Nathanson, 1/24/98
      
      

Don Nathanson's helpful response to my query re shame and ADHD is greatly appreciated.

Don writes "What I describe as primary shame in this situation is my observation that these kids/adults/people respond normally with the range of affect we call interest-excitement when a novel stimulus appears. So far, so good. But, I believe, in this syndrome something is wrong with the mechanism for the maintenance of interest-excitement, and that the affect is interrupted suddenly. I think that the interruption is forced by an internal glitch of some sort,"

Yes Don, I agree fully. My self awareness identifies the the situational glitch as a painful flashback of feeling elicited by a new triggering association. Until the eliciting event was identified my glitch, as I understand your explanation, would be classified as primary. Analysis and or good introspection oft resurrects the original triggering event. For example for many I sensed shame when I raised my hand in response to an inviting question. Only when I recalled my experience at age four,as a guest attending a Church ice cream social. When the pastor asked the group why we were ereI raised my hand and responded "For Ice Cream" to which my hostess,in what I percieved as a rage, took me out to her car and promptly returned me home. (Sans ice cream)

Would you now reclassify my acute flash backs or restimulatons of shame as "Secondary?"

Would you postulate that my extreme sense of pain was aresult of the magnitude of the stimulus, or was it more a consequence of my limbic oversensitivity, a result of an imbalance between my amygdala - hippocampus - caudate nucleus, my pain-pleasure alarm/response mechanism as described by Joe LaDeux?

Was I just too much of a puppy dog and not enough shrew at the time? In retrospect I think I was "emotionally hijackked" at the time (Goldman)

Respectfully submitted and with continuing appreciation for your illuminating thoughts.

Gordon J. Shannon, M.D.

• Primary and secondary manifestations of ADD by Don Nathanson, 7/19/98
  • Secondary as trigger for primary by (No author), 9/22/98
    • affects are analogues of their stimulus conditions by Don Nathanson, 9/23/98